"connection going off and on "

yes, I've Adelphia cable and when I get on lets say yahoo I lag very badly I cannot keep voice and I get kicked. I cannot get back on so I go look at the modem and the third light is flashing orange which means I've no connection. Well the Adelphia cable guy came today and said that it could not be the connection because it was strong and that he'd just put in a new modem. This still doesn't seem to be working out very well. I have done everything there is to do to my computer and I've no idea as to why it is doing this... can someone help me?!?!?!?!?!?

I also have Adelphia cable for the internet. I've had them now for about 6 months. Since day one I have had problems with speed. My speeds have been as low as 6K and as high as 2450K. mostly averageing around the 28.8 modem speed. I have been on the phone with them several times and I have heard everything from spyware causing the prob. to somewhere on the internet I leave the Adelphia network and hit a slow down there. If you want to know my thoughts? Adelphia is the problem. They sound more and more like the phone company every day. I left a firm 1.4M DSL connection for the entire 3 years I was with surfcity.net without a disruption in service. So I don't know about you but this cable sucks. I'll be going back to DSL very soon.

Tom, try going to your command prompt (go to start button, then to 'run', type 'command' hit enter.
Next to the " c:\ "
type
ping www.google.com

it will send a 'ping' to google.com which will 'pong' back to you. it will do it 3 times.
the responses you get will have one part that says time=40ms
it won't say '40',,, it may say 25 or 80 or whatever,,, its the amount of time in milliseconds that it took to send the ping and recieve the pong. It should take about the same amount of time on each attempt, give or take.
now type
ping www.google.com -t
this will send a ping to google everysecond until you tell it to stop (by holding ctrl and hitting 'c')
Let this run like that for a few minutes. The time should be relatively the same for each ping (and by relatively the same,, maybe range by upto 40 to 60 milliseconds, such as 22, 85, 76, 44, etc.)
What you are looking for is oddball ones, 200 milliseconds, something far off like that.
If you see this repeatedly, you are likely running into a problem of packet loss. This could be caused by your ethernet cable, the cable from the wall to the modem, the lines in the house, the splitter, the line to the pole or box outside, the amp, a bad modem, etc.

As far as testing where the slowdown is happening.... at your c:\ type
tracert www.google.com
this will ping each step from you to google (your modem, the cmts at the cable office, other pieces of equipment at the office, the server where it hits the backbone, various other servers in route to google.
You may be surprised by the path taken to get to google (or whatever you type in, it can be most anything).. Mine takes 14 steps. Look at the time at each step. The first couple are servers from your provider, they should be kinda short times,, the other stuff might be longer. Again, here, if you see something that reports a much longer time than the other stops, this may point to the actual problem. It may be a problem somewhere else and not your ISP. But with the speeds you are talking about, I'd guess that the problem is closer to home. Either your computer (software or hardware), your modem, your wiring, or the wiring from the house to the pole or whatever you feed from.

If your cable modem light was flashing, you lost connection, which you know. Call them back and tell them you want a guy that works on cable modem problems to come look at it. tell them that it is dropping offline still.
It is very possible that your signal is great coming to the modem. It could be that your modem is having to push too hard to talk back to the cable office. It can only push so hard, if something happens that blocks the signal just a little more, your modem will pop offline. The tech should know this though, so thats probably not the problem.
Something the tech may not have known... If the line coming to your house is not grounded very well to the electric meter or panel's copper ground wire, you could experience the problems you're having. This is an oddball problem that is hard to track down at first because it doesn't seem to effect your signal or other channels. In case any techs are reading this.. this is the number one cause of intermittent problems with cable modems. The line must be grounded (at the first point possible, ground block or first split if there is no ground block) and it must be tight! No wiggle! Try to bond to the copper wire from electric, if there is no wire, ground to meter base or the metal riser coming off the meter base. On older electric systems that have the round meter base with a metal nut that the electric line enters the base through, don't ground to the nut or the base. It is not a good ground, you may put a ground out here just for appearance to pass code, but bond it inside to the copper ground wire at the electric panel inside (breaker box), or in a last ditch effort, to the water pipes if you know they are bonded to power, and are metal. Many times I will bond outside and if there is a place to do it near a split in the basement or attic, I'll bond there too!.....

sorry for the side step there....

Another common cause of these strange intermittent modem connections that have good signal...
If you have a wireless access point or wireless router.. make sure to have atleast a foot or so of space between it and the cable modem. Even if they've been stacked on top eachother with no problems for a year... if you start having these connection problems, separate the modem and router! Strange but it works. For some reason the wireless knocks the modem offline at random times.
Hope this helps some people
Joe